I hold to faith in the divine love — which, so many years ago for a brief moment in a little corner of the earth, walked about as a man bearing the name of Jesus Christ — as the foundation on which alone my happiness rests.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is the intermixing of different genres.

Propylaea (1798) Introduction

The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths.

Propylaea (1798) Introduction

In limitations he first shows himself the master,
And the law can only bring us freedom.

Who wants to understand the poem
Must go to the land of poetry;
Who wishes to understand the poet
Must go to the poet's land.

West-östlicher Diwan, motto (1819)

For I have been a man, and that means to have been a fighter.

West-östlicher Diwan, Buch des Paradies (1819)

Should I not be proud, when for twenty years I have had to admit to myself that the great Newton and all the mathematicians and noble calculators along with him were involved in a decisive error with respect to the doctrine of color, and that I among millions was the only one who knew what was right in this great subject of nature?

Letter to Eckermann (30 December 1823)

All poetry is supposed to be instructive but in an unnoticeable manner; it is supposed to make us aware of what it would be valuable to instruct ourselves in; we must deduce the lesson on our own, just as with life.

Letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter (26 November 1825)

One must be something in order to do something.

Conversation with Eckermann (20 October 1828)

"I have found a paper of mine among some others in which I call architecture 'petrified music.' Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music."

Conversations with Eckermann (23 March 1829) - Often quoted as "Architecture is frozen music."

If I work incessantly to the last, nature owes me another form of existence when the present one collapses.

Letter to Eckermann (4 February 1829)

The artist may be well advised to keep his work to himself till it is completed, because no one can readily help him or advise him with it...but the scientist is wiser not to withhold a single finding or a single conjecture from publicity.

Which is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.

The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe as translated by Bailey Saunders (1893) Maxim 225

Amerika, du hast es besser—als unser Kontinent, der alte.

America, you have it better than our continent, the old one.

Wendts Musen-Almanach (1831)

Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others,
And in their pleasure takes joy, even as though 'twere his own.
Not in the morning alone, not only at mid-day he charmeth;
Even at setting, the sun is still the same glorious planet.

"Distichs" in The Poems of Goethe (1853) as translated in the original metres by Edgar Alfred Bowring

And now the sagacious reader, who is capable of reading into these lines what does not stand written in them, but is nevertheless implied, will be able to form some conception of the serious feelings with which I then set foot in Emmendingen.

The person engaged in action is always unconscionable; no one except the contemplative has a conscience.

Maxims and Reflections, Elisabeth Stopp, trans. (Penguin: 1998) #241

A burgher may acquire merit; by excessive efforts he may even educate his mind; but his personal qualities are lost, or worse than lost, let him struggle as he will. Since the nobleman, frequenting the society of the most polished, is compelled to give himself a polished manner; since this manner, neither door nor gate being shut against him, grows at last an unconstrained one; since, in court or camp, his figure, his person, are a part of his possessions, and it may be the most necessary part, — he has reason enough to put some value on them, and to show that he puts some.

"No matter how far our spiritual culture may continue to progress, no matter how much the natural sciences may grow, becoming ever more profound and more inclusive, no matter how much the human spirit may will to expand, that human spirit will never escape from the majesty and ethical sublimity of Christianity, as it shimmers and shines in the Gospels."

Last words, as quoted in The Medico-chirurgical Review and Journal of Medical Science, Vol. 24 (1834), p. 501 [He apparently, here, asking for the shutters to be opened to admit more light, nothing more.]

Someone has said that world history must from time to time be rewritten. When has there been an epoch that made this as necessary as does the present one? You provided a superb example of how it should be done. The hatred of the Romans for the victor, even when he was kindly, presumption upon outmoded privileges, the desire for a different state of affairs without having anything better in view, irrational hopes, haphazard undertakings, alliances with no prospect of benefit, and whatever else is the unhappy retinue of such times—you have described all that magnificently, proving to us that such things really happened in those days.

As qoted by Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought (1991) from a letter referring to Sartorius' historical study of the rule of the Ostragoths in Italy

Not to keep from error, is the duty of the educator of men, but to guide the erring one, even to let him swill his error out of full cups—that is the wisdom of teachers. Whoever merely tastes of his error, will keep house with it for a long time, … but whoever drains it completely will have to get to know it.

Knowst thou the land where the lemon trees bloom,
Where the gold orange glows in the deep thicket's gloom,
Where a wind ever soft from the blue heaven blows,
And the groves are of laurel and myrtle and rose?

Bk. III, Ch. 1

What's it to you if I love you?

Philine in Bk. IV, Ch. 9

Variant translation: If I love you, what business is it of yours?

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

Bk. V, Ch. 1

To know of someone here and there whom we accord with, who is living on with us, even in silence — this makes our earthly ball a peopled garden.

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and though distant, is close to us in spirit — this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.

Not to keep from error, is the duty of the educator of men, but to guide the erring one, even to let him swill his error out of full cups — that is the wisdom of teachers. Whoever merely tastes of his error, will keep house with it for a long time, … but whoever drains it completely will have to get to know it.

Who science has and art
He has religion too
Who neither of them owns
Religion is his due.

As quoted in Jost Lemmerich's "Science and Conscience: The Life of James Franck" (2011), p. 261.

Variant translation: "The man who science has and art, He also has religion. But he who is devoid of both, He surely needs religion." (as quoted in "Homilies of science" by Paul Carus (1892) and The Open Court, Weekly Journal, Vol. II (1887).

Tell me you stones, O speak, you towering palaces!
Streets, say a word! Spirit of this place, are you dumb?
All things are alive in your sacred walls
Eternal Rome, it's only for me all is still.

Elegy 1

I'm gazing at church and palace, ruin and column,
Like a serious man making sensible use of a journey,
But soon it will happen, and all will be one vast temple,
Love's temple, receiving its new initiate.Though you're a whole world, Rome, still, without Love,
The world isn't the world, and Rome can't be Rome.

Elegy 1

Ah, how often I've cursed those foolish pages,
That showed my youthful sufferings to everyone!
If Werther had been my brother, and I'd killed him,
His sad ghost could hardly have persecuted me more.

Beloved, don't fret that you gave yourself so quickly!
Believe me, I don't think badly or wrongly of you.
The arrows of Love are various: some scratch us,
And our hearts suffer for years from their slow poison.
But others strong-feathered with freshly sharpened points
Pierce to the marrow, and quickly inflame the blood.
In the heroic ages, when gods and goddesses loved,
Desire followed a look, and joy followed desire.

Elegy 3

I feel I'm happily inspired now on Classical soil:
The Past and Present speak louder, more charmingly.
Here, as advised, I leaf through the works of the Ancients
With busy hands, and, each day, with fresh delight.
But at night Love keeps me busy another way:
I become half a scholar but twice as contented.
And am I not learning, studying the shape
Of her lovely breasts: her hips guiding my hand?

All Nine often used to come to me, I mean the Muses:
But I ignored them: my girl was in my arms.
Now I’ve left my sweetheart: and they’ve left me,
And I roll my eyes, seeking a knife or rope.
But Heaven is full of gods: You came to aid me:
Greetings, Boredom, mother of the Muse.

Epigram 27

Is it so big a mystery
what god and man and world are?
No! but nobody knows how to solve it
so the mystery hangs on.

As translated by Jerome Rothenberg

Much there is I can stand. Most things not easy to suffer
I bear with quiet resolve, just as a God commands it.
Only a few things I find as repugnant as snakes and poison.
These four: tobacco smoke, bedbugs and garlic and Christ.

Epigram 60

Much there is I can stand, and most things not easy to suffer
I bear with quiet resolve, just as a god commands it.
Only a few I find as repugnant as snakes and poison —
These four: tobacco smoke, bedbugs, garlic, and †.

Variant translation: Lots of things I can stomach. Most of what irks me
I take in my stride, as a god might command me.
But four things I hate more than poisons & vipers:
tobacco smoke, garlic, bedbugs, and Christ.

Epigram 67, as translated by Jerome Rothenberg

Doesn't surprise me that Christ our Lord
preferred to live with whores
& sinners, seeing
I go in for that myself.

Good! A method can be used
without physicians, gold, or magic,
Go out into the open field
and start to dig and cultivate;
keep your body and your spirit
in a humble and restricted sphere,
sustain yourself by simple fare,
live with your herd and spread your own manure
on land from which you reap your nourishment.
Believe me, that's the best procedure
to keep your youth for eighty years or more.

A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.

"I have often felt a bitter sorrow at the thought of the German people, which is so estimable in the individual and so wretched in the generality. A comparison of the German people with other peoples arouses a painful feeling, which I try to overcome in every possible way." Goethes Gespraeche, December 13, 1813

I’m sorry for people who make a great to-do about the transitory nature of things and get lost in meditations of earthly nothingness. Surely we are here precisely so as to turn what passes into something that endures; but this is possible only if you can appreciate both.

It is the most foolish of all errors for young people of good intelligence to imagine that they will forfeit their originality if they acknowledge truth already acknowledged by others.

Elisabeth Stopp, trans. (Penguin: 1998) #254

One often says to oneself … that one ought to avoid having too many different businesses, to avoid becoming a jack-of-all-trades, and that the older one gets, the more one ought to avoid entering into new business. But … the very fact of growing older means taking up a new business; all our circumstances change, and we must either stop doing anything at all or else willing and consciously take on the new role we have to play on life’s stage.

"Smoking stupefies a man, and makes him incapable of thinking or writing. It is only fit for idlers, people who are always bored, who sleep for a third of their lifetime, fritter away another third in eating, drinking, and other necessary or unnecessary affairs, and don’t know—though they are always complaining that life is so short—what to do with the rest of their time. Such lazy Turks find mental solace in handling a pipe and gazing at the clouds of smoke that they puff into the air; it helps them to kill time. Smoking induces drinking beer, for hot mouths need to be cooled down. Beer thickens the blood, and adds to the intoxication produced by the narcotic smoke. The nerves are dulled and the blood clotted. If they go on as they seem to be doing now, in two or three generations we shall see what these beer-swillers and smoke-puffers have made of Germany. You will notice the effect on our literature—mindless, formless, and hopeless; and those very people will wonder how it has come about. And think of the cost of it all ! Fully 25,000,000 thalers a year end in smoke all over Germany, and the sum may rise to forty, fifty, or sixty millions. The hungry are still unfed, and the naked unclad. What can become of all the money? Smoking, too, is gross rudeness and unsociability. Smokers poison the air far and wide and choke every decent man, unless he takes to smoking in self-defence. Who can enter a smoker’s room without feeling ill ? Who can stay there without perishing?"

Heinrich Luden, Rueckblicke in mein Leben, Jena 1847

The ever-changing display of plant forms, which I have followed for so many years, awakens increasingly within me the notion: The plant forms which surround us were not all created at some given point in time and then locked into the given form, they have been given… a felicitous mobility and plasticity that allows them to grow and adapt themselves to many different conditions in many different places. …How they can be brought together under one concept has slowly become clear to me and that this conception can be enlivened at a higher level [of consciousness]: thus I began to recognize, in the sense perceptible form, a supersensible archetype. Whoever has felt what a rich, saturated thought… has to say, will admit what a passionate movement comes to life in the spirit when we are enthused, and we anticipate the totality of what will evolve step by step…”

Niebuhr was right when he saw a barbarous age coming. It is already here, we are in it, for in what does barbarism consist, if not in the failure to appreciate what is excellent?

p. 97

"As Goethe remarked, all eras in a state of decline and dissolution are subjective, while in all great eras which have been really in a state of progression, every effort is directed from the inward to the outward world; it is of an objective nature. I have always believed, as Goethe did, that here one comes on a true sense of the term classic."

p. 184

"Goethe suggested, in the interest of clearness one might very well make a clean sweep of all terms like classic, modernist, realist, naturalist and substitute the simple terms healthy and sickly."

p. 184

[Those who make the assumption that literacy carries with it the ability to read] do not know what time and trouble it costs to learn to read. I have been working at it for eighteen years, and I can't say yet that I am completely successful.

Goethe at the age of seventy-nine

p. 194

Man will become more clever and sagacious, but not better, happier or showing more resolute wisdom; or at least, only at periods.

p. 214

Was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.

That which holds us all in bondage, the common and ignoble.

p. 227

[The next sentence after predicting that great progress is coming:] I foresee the time when God will have no further pleasure in man, but will break up everything for a new creation.

If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.

As quoted in Human Development : A Science of Growth (1961) by Justin Pikunas, p. 311; this might be based on a translation or paraphrase by Viktor Frankl, to whom it is also sometimes attributed; reportedly in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Book VIII chapter 4

I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.

Widely attributed to Goethe, but also claimed to be a distortion of a passage by Haim Ginott (Who lived hundreds of years after Goethe?!).

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.

Attributed to Goethe by popular British novelist Marie Corelli in her essay "The Spirit of Work" as published in The Queen's Christmas carol : an anthology of poems, stories, essays, drawings and music / by British authors, artists and composers in 1905 by The Daily Mail of London.

I have been reading a translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. Is it good? To be it seems perhaps the very worst book I ever read. No Englishman could have written such a book. I cannot remember a single good page or idea,, and this priggishness is the finest of its kin that I can call to mind. Is it all a practical joke? If it really is Goethe's Wilhelm Meister that I have been reading, I am glad I have never taken the trouble to learn German.

He admired nature's moving order and conceived of form as a pattern of relationships within an organized whole—a conception that is at the forefront of contemporary systems thinking. "Each creature," wrote Goethe, "is but a patterned gradation of one great harmonious whole.

Germanic philosophical idealism is also reflected in the work of Johann Goethe, whom Hayek often read as a young man. [...] What Goethe apparently meant is that mind must first have a way of interpreting experience; next, experience is interpreted by mind. Thus, “all that is factual is already theory,” because the way that facts (experience) are interpreted is mentally constructed. There are no atomistic facts in this perspective, because all experience is interpreted.

Whereas Newton had maintained that colours already exist blended together in sunlight, Goethe insisted that they arise from the conjunction of polar opposites—just look, he said, at the coloured fringes you see against a sharp black/white edge. ...Many Romantic experimenters (including Samuel Coleridge, an important conduit for Naturphilosophie into Britain) welcomed Goethe's emphasis on polarity, which resonated with their own investigations into magnetic, electrical, and chemical activity—north and south, positive and negative, attractive and repulsive. Just as Goethe used his own eye as a recording instrument, they made their own bodies part of electric circuits.

Of Goethe it may be said that he created to a large extent the language and style of that which is best in the modern literature of his country. No such supreme influence belonging to a single individual can probably be found in any other German, French, or English writer in our century...

Goethe wondered at what point our instruments might be creating what we think we see out there in the world. ...his question is still a good one. Every science of observation must take care not to get lost among its own artifacts.

Theodore Roszak, The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999)

Goethe, lover of nature as he was, ruled mathematics out of place in natural history.

About the end of the eighteenth century fruitful suggestions and even clear presentations of this or that part of a large evolutionary doctrine came thick and fast, and from the most divergent quarters. Especially remarkable were those which came from Erasmus Darwin in England, from Maupertuis in France, from Oken in Switzerland, and from Herder, and, most brilliantly of all, from Goethe in Germany.